Six minutes at a rolling bench in Laguna, where our Manila cigars are rolled in the Cuban method. No music and no voice-over. Ronnie rolls a Robusto Maduro from the first leaf to the cap and explains what the hands are doing while they do it.
The bench is a plank of narra, worn pale where the forearms rest. On it: a chaveta, a pot of vegetable gum, a wooden mould with ten hollows, and a small pile of leaves sorted the evening before. Ronnie arrived at the manufactory in the year the new highway opened and has not changed benches since. Twenty-two years. The film follows one cigar, and one only.
- 00:00The bunch. Three filler leaves folded into a loose accordion, the strongest in the middle.
- 01:40The binder. An Isabela leaf wrapped around the bunch, then thirty minutes in the mould.
- 03:10The wrapper. Maduro, cut on the bias, rolled with the thumb and the flat of the palm.
- 04:50The cap. Three pieces of wrapper leaf, one on top of the other. The signature of the house.
- 05:30The draw machine. A needle settles between two marks. Ronnie does not look at it.
What the hands know
We asked one question at the start and then stopped asking. What changed in twenty-two years? The answer took the whole film. The first year, Ronnie says, you fight the leaf. You pull too hard, the wrapper tears, the bunch is either a stone or a sponge. Then one day the leaf tells you how tight it wants to be, and you listen. Nobody can teach that part. They can only give you the years.
“The maduro wrapper is the one that fights back. You roll it slower, and you roll it warm.”Ronnie · roller · Laguna
There is a moment at 04:50 that we kept in full, although it lasts forty seconds and nothing seems to happen. It is the triple cap. Most factories put one piece of leaf on the head of the cigar. Some put two. Ronnie cuts three small rounds with the chaveta, sets them one on the other with a fingertip of gum, and smooths each one before the next. It takes longer. It also holds when you cut it, and it is how the Manila cigar was capped when the royal factories still stood on the Pasig.
Why we filmed it this way
Because the argument for a Manila cigar is not something we can say. It has to be seen, and the person who can show it is at that bench. The film runs without commentary because Ronnie's own words are better than ours, and without music because the room has its own: the tap of the chaveta, the mould closing, the fan.
The Robusto Maduro rolled in this film went into the box marked for the tasting kit. If you smoke one this autumn in Dubai, there is a fair chance it passed through these hands.
